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What Skeptics Should Know about Organized Religion
It’s enough to make the pious pant and the devout doubt. As widely reported in the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2020 Census of American Religion, religious faith is in retreat across the US. Nearly 23 percent of Americans are now religiously unaffiliated. Of those, five percent identify with non-Christian religions. And within the believer categories, White mainline Protestants now outnumber White Evangelicals 16 percent to 14 percent. In 2006, White Evangelicals commanded 23 percent of the faith circle.
While skeptics of all organized religions might cheer these results, the numbers don’t always add up. Troubling questions continue to surface like gophers on a golf course. Some examples:
How do skeptics balance a slowly secularizing America with the outsized political clout of some groups — White Christian Evangelicals, for instance?
How do skeptics gauge the dividing line between church and state as it starts to crumble like a row of brick chimneys in a tornado?
What are skeptics to think about the stupefying appeal of fundamentalist preachers who find Satan at every turn?
Perhaps the best answers come from knowing and understanding the lay of the land — scouting the hallowed hollows like scientists on an expedition. To that end, I journeyed into…
